Strum Reviewed By James Broderick Ph.D of Bookpleasures.com

James Broderick Ph.D

Reviewer James
Broderick, Ph.D: James is an associate professor of English and journalism at
New Jersey City University. A former newspaper reporter and editor,
he is the author of six non-fiction books, and the novel Stalked. His
latest book is Greatness Thrust Upon Them, a collection of interviews
with Shakespearean actors across America. Follow Here To Listen To An Interview With James Broderick.

Nancy Young’s novel
Strum begins with a French epigram from 17th century French
mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal that essentially
communicates the idea that “the heart has its reasons that reason
knows nothing about.” It’s one of Pascal’s better known
aphorisms. But the more deeply I read into this poignant and
compelling book, the more I kept thinking back to another of Pascal’s
oft-cited quotes, rendered in English as “If we examine our
thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the
future.”

Strum not only exemplifies
that idea, as well as the tidal pull of time in the sea-changes of
our lives, but Young has structured her novel according to that
principle, with chapters leaping back and forth in time, from the
1800s to the year 2000. The novel also leaps about in place, from the
Canadian hinterlands to the French Alps, from Southeast Asia to
Australia.

To describe Strum, with
all its digressions and excavations, would make it sound like a
complex creation worthy of Pascal himself as it wends its way through
a labyrinth of six generations, but the novel is really quite simple,
and Young does a great job of keeping the string of significant
events hummingly clear. The fulcrum of the book is music, or perhaps
“sound” would be a better way of saying it, as sounds both heard
and sensed comprise much of the charm and fabric of the book. More
specifically, the music of a hand-crafted set of guitars provides the
soundtrack to the lives of scores of noteworthy characters one meets
within the pages of Strum.

The central conceit of the
book – and the pulsating rhythm of its plot – involves how the
music of these particular guitars connects a multi-generational mixed
race family and the lovers and others who comprise their aural sects
as we follow them through time. The novel opens with a vignette of
magical realism: a deaf woodworker follows an eerie, enchanting music
he hears in a dream, taking him deep into a forest, stalking the
source of his nocturnal delight amid the centuries-old cedars that
spire skyward.

What follows is an
exhausting and exhilarating adventure, taking the readers from the
tumult of timber mills to the somnolence of cloistered convents, and
later, from the dark and threatening jungle to the stately
resplendence of the modern opera house. All along the way, the
writing (like the music that floats though the text) remains lush and
ornamental, rococo in its rhetorical coloration:

“Her
fingers flew up and down the fret board marking out a recuerdo both
passionate and lamenting…her gypsy soul found a platform in the
soundboard of the instrument and with it the dying embers of her
passionate spirit were rekindled and stoked into a blaze. Each rising
arpeggio was an ascent into the upper reaches of a Vesuvius summit
and the descents a plunge into infinite sobriety.”

If such impassioned and
emotionally heightened language (unfairly taken out of context here,
I concede) seems a bit overheated, it might be best to again remember
Pascal, who argued that the fundamental truths of human existence
could not be stated, or discovered, through the cold filter of
reason. In Strum, Nancy Young affirms that principle in prose that
would likely have left Pascal nodding in affirmation.